The best is enemy of the good.
The profoundest truths are paradoxical.

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Friday, September 26, 2014

"Liberal Democracy Is Living Off Borrowed Moral Capital," Christopher Lasch

"Liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism... Democracy has to stand for something more demanding than enlightened self-interest, openness and toleration." Excerpt from Lasch's "The Revolt Of The Elites"

Alan: The chief champions of American consumerism are "conservatives," often "Christian" "conservatives.Possessed by unshakable belief in authority, it does not occur to "conservatives" that The Enemy is within the gates and has always been within the gates; that it paid for the gates in order to protect itself!

"Follow the money" and you will find conservative fingerprints all over "the destruction of family life."Yes. Liberals share the blame.

However, "conservatives" approve the entire Economic System whose substructure and superstructure degrade the family synergistically.On the other side of the aisle, the degratory outcomes wrought by liberals focus particular policies rather than lickspittle adulation of Cowboy Capitalism, lock, stock and barrel.

Conservative acclaim for the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision is an egregious case in point, demonstrating The Right Wing's total (and totalitarian) surrender to The Big Money increasingly sequestered by America's plutocratic class.

"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"

In the end, the destruction wrought by conservatives is contextual-and-comprehensive whereas the destruction wrought by liberals concentrates the specific content of patchwork policies while consistently disapproving the overarching (and now unimpeded) corrosion of Cowboy Capitalism.

Behind it all is "conservatism's" impotent insistence on resurrecting a Golden Age that never was and never will be.Liberals, on the other hand, partially redeem themselves by nourishing communitarian connectedness which is very family friendly as I know from my own liberal neighborhood in a small southern town. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough,_North_Carolina

Conservatives are constitutionally unable to recognize that T.R.'s "invisible government" is comprised of thieving plutocrats who, if a profit can made, will sacrifice any value on the altar of Mammon. It's what these self-professed "conservatives" have always done. And it's what they're doing now - more corrosively than ever.

For conservatives, the championship of "Impossibly Pure Principles" is everything. These squeaky clean "patriots" are, literally, "to true to be good." In fact, they are systematically antagonistic to the achievement of limited, imperfect goods that are within our grasp.

"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”

"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,”by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton

"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"

Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.”“Where the Right Went Wrong"

Alan: I hold that "common sense" is overvalued and that it is more important to have uncommon sense.Two illustrations come immediately to mind:"Love your enemies. Do good to those who persecute you." "The last shall be first and the first last."